Authors Electric

The Dark Side It’s a grey stormy afternoon in February and I am contemplating the dark side.  “Comparison is Death” said my friend Jonathan and in terms of artistic endeavour he is so right. Jonathan was talking about acting, but it’s as true for writing. There is nothing more debilitating, or eroding of confidence as comparing your work with other more successful writers. In that lies misery and perdition. So many of us find ourselves asking why when we look at novels, no better no worse than ours that reach the best seller list. Even worse is when a writer you don’t really rate sells millions of books. Reading their novels won’t help. You might get an idea about what they do that appeals to their readers, but more than likely you will be plunged even further into the depths of…is it envy? That has to be part of it, but there’s something else operating here, which is to do with the vulnerability of being a writer. We all write to communicate, but the process...

I’ve written much over the years about the pros and cons of offering ebooks for free. I once swore I’d never do it, that I’d sweated blood and wasn’t about to give my efforts away for nothing, that writers should always be paid for their work. And then sales dried up. With a six-book series, FREE seemed the way to generate interest and offer readers a way to see if they liked my books. Try before you buy , in effect. And for a while it worked. For well over a year, I was selling more books by giving one away than I was when they were all at a fixed price. And then sales dried up. To be fair, the past year or so seems to have been hard for a lot of us. Blame the referendum, Brexit, Trump – whatever excuses you can come up with – but sales aren’t what they were eighteen months ago. At all. The traditional authors are squeezed in different ways, and I can’t pretend to understand how it all works in the rarefied strata of the big 6/5/4/whatever, but the indie pecking-order is so...

          I had good sales in June and July, for some reason. I had The Ghost Drum, by Susan Price done nothing in the way of publicity that I hadn't done before, but my sales nearly doubled in June, and then doubled again in July. We're still talking low figures, mind. The Lear jet isn't on order yet...but still.           For one thing, something odd was happening in Germany. Having steadfastly ignored my kindle output since I started, Germany suddenly sprang to attention and bought ten of my books - one copy each of ten of the eleven books I've self-published.           I've no idea whether this was one person buying all ten books, or ten different people buying a different book each, or some mixture of the above - one person buying five different copies, say, another buying two, and three other people buying one each. Amazon doesn't allow you ...

It Only Happens In Stories    A short story that is growing into a long one ...           Last year I wrote a longish short story and published it on Amazon as a free giveaway over the Christmas period. The idea was to try and use it as a way of introducing myself to potential new readers and hopefully regenerating interest in my (paid for) collection of short pony stories.           I meant to take it off again after the five days free promo, but being busy with other stuff, I forgot until a couple of weeks later. When I remembered, I checked - as one does - to see if any had been sold, and was pleasantly surprised to see that far from sales plummeting after 400 odd freebies had been downloaded, it was actually doing quite nicely, thank you. And what was more, it had garnered more reviews than any of my other books, whether digital or paper. All of them nice: the only ne...

Cover Design by Rob Tysall   Fear. Fear. A fanatical devotion to the.... no, fear again. I'm not a complete e-publishing newbie. Last November, the Coventry Writers' group, to which I belong, ventured into e-publishing with our Coventry Tales . It was a rewarding and educational experience and the sales, while not amazing, have not been bad. Nor am I a stranger to conventional publishing (or whatever it's OK to call it now... I can never remember). I've had two books for adults and one for YA published that way and I have another series commissioned, this time for younger readers. So I'm not a complete beginner, though I'm relatively inexperienced in comparison with many of  my esteemed co-contributors on this blog (I'm learning lots from them). And I now have a book ready for e-release. Well, almost ready. It's been revised to within a jot and tittle of its life. It's been edited and proofed. I've hired a professional designer and pho...

"WHSmith, why hast thou forsaken me?" There is a truth universally acknowledged: s uccess in the arts has nothing to do with your actual work, or its quality, or how many hours a day you spend networking, but is neatly expressed via the formula Sales =  f + b 2 where 'f' is Your Fame and 'b' is Blind Luck. This is, as I'm sure you know, a law so entrenched it makes gravity look optional. And, of course, it isn't news. There are ancient scrolls discovered in underwater caves beneath jurassic sediment which contain fresher information.  So why bring it up now, and make writers everywhere weep quietly into their el cheapo wine? Because this is the time of year when I always read a number of blogs and articles expressing this truth as if it was some kind of sudden, horrific revelation. I blame Christmas. Writers everywhere watch the bills pile up, and their bank balance empty faster than the Greek economy, and then they switch on Radio 4 as a ...